Ethicon

Ethicon

Revitalising the front-end innovation process

Context

Ethicon has been at the forefront of innovation in surgical instrumentation. As new technologies have emerged, Ethicon sought to be more ambitious in how it builds its innovation pipeline.

Ethicon asked Innovia to help it revitalise its front-end process, enabling bigger investment in breakthrough innovation and increasing agility to respond to new technologies.

Approach

We explored the organisation’s needs through a coalition of people across the business with a shared innovation philosophy. Working together, we designed a process and toolkit, based on agile innovation principles. We investigated how to improve front-end productivity so Ethicon could consider more opportunities over longer horizons. And finally, we advised on resource reallocation to shift the balance of responsibility for incremental and breakthrough innovation.

Impact

We piloted the process and then launched it with two business units, reviewing it after six months. The project sponsor described our work as a "tremendous improvement on previous approaches." It enabled practitioners to make decisions more easily about whether to retire risk and how to prioritise next steps, and it enabled executives to make more timely decisions about the innovation portfolio.

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